Originally from Canada but now based in Switzerland, Aaron has been in the IT industry for over two decades. He has founded and managed startups, worked for fortune 500 companies, and most other stops in between. He is deeply interested in the confluence between society and technology, and takes an ethical stand on the freedom of the software he writes and uses, often referred to as open source or Free software. (He prefers the latter term, despite its unfortunate potential for confusion with lack of price.)

He spent some 14 years with the KDE community as a software developer, community coordinator and a member of the board of directors of KDE's global non-profit, KDE e.v. where he also served a term as President. While with KDE, he was the lead developer and architect of Plasma (Desktop, Netbook and the mobile-focused Active), widely regarded as the premiere desktop environment for Linux and other Free software systems. During this period he was noted as one of the top 50 most influential people in IT by silicon.com.